Oláhfalu: The Crayfish as Tailor (Small Town Legends A to Z)

This year my A to Z theme is Small Town Legends. I am exploring folklore from villages and small towns around Hungary, bringing you the most entertaining bits. You can plan your next visit around them!

Oláhfalu is actually the former/colloquial name of the town of Szentegyháza in Transylvania, with a population about 6,300 (mostly Hungarian-speaking). There is a surprising number of funny anecdotes and joking folklore about the silly things people did in this town - most of which are universal legend types tailored to the locality.

Here is one of them:

The people of Oláhfalu once caught a crayfish in a stream. They weren't sure what it was, so they convened, and decided that it must be a tailor, since it had two pairs of scissors (pincers). Now that they had their own tailor, they placed the crayfish on a length of cloth to work. Wherever the wet crayfish crawled, leaving a trail, they kept cutting after it, expecting a pattern. In the end, with the animal meandering all over the place, the length of cloth was ruined.

The people of the town convened again, and decided the tailor should be punished for deceiving them. They didn't want to commit murder, so in the end, they thought it was best to drown the criminal - and tossed the crayfish into the river.

(Collected by Duka János in the middle of the 20th century)

Fun fact: This story type exists about various villages all over Hungary and Transylvania. There are also countless similar stories where the inhabitants of a village don't recognise an everyday object. My own grandfather used to tell a story about the neighboring village were people tried to beat a muff to death, thinking it was an animal.

Nagylengyel: The Exploding Dragon (Small Town Legends A to Z)

This year my A to Z theme is Small Town Legends. I am exploring folklore from villages and small towns around Hungary, bringing you the most entertaining bits. You can plan your next visit around them!

Nagylengyel is a municipality of about 500 people in Zala county, western Hungary. The legend concerning the dragon, and the village's church, was collected and shared with me by folklorist Magyar Zoltán.

Here it is:

In Babosdöbréte there lived a lord who owned large flocks of sheep and pigs. One day, his shepherds reported that animals were going missing. For a while, no one knew who or what was stealing the livestock... until they found out there was a dragon living nearby, preying on animals and people alike. The lord announced that he would grant 100 acres of land to the person who could get rid of the dragon.

The lord had a servant who was known for her faith. She went out and spied on the dragon for a while, before returning home. She baked a series of buns, hollowed them out, and filled them with quicklime. She then went back to the willow tree where the dragon usually rested, and started throwing the buns to it from a safe distance. The dragon devoured the buns, and then started looking for water. The servant woman left a large bucket of water nearby. As the dragon drank, the quicklime in its stomach reacted with the water - and the dragon exploded.

The lord granted the 100 acres to the woman, and she used it to build the church of Nagylengyel.

(The story was collected from Török János in Vorhota)

Coat of arms of Nagylengyel

The dragon actually references the Sárkány family, benefactors of the village

The dog refers to St. Dominic, patron of the church

The flame references the oil discovered nearby

Máriagyűd: A Church Rolling on Peas (Small Town Legends A to Z)

This year my A to Z theme is Small Town Legends. I am exploring folklore from villages and small towns around Hungary, bringing you the most entertaining bits. You can plan your next visit around them!

Image from here

Máriagyűd is now a part of the town of Siklós in Baranya county, southern Hungary. Before 1977, it was its own municipality with about 1,500 inhabitants. The church, rebuilt in the 18th century, is a famous shrine and pilgrimage site for the Virgin Mary.

Here is the legend:

In the olden days the church of Gyüd was not in its current place. It used to be up on the mountain. But the priests didn't like that they had to climb all the way up every morning. So they got together and tried to figure out how to move the church to a more convenient place. One of them had an idea: they should lift the church, spread dried peas under it, and roll it.

And so they did. They got people together, lifted the church with levers, spread buckets of dried peas under it, and spread even more peas along the mountainside (don't ask). Then they gave the church a push. The church began to roll down the mountainside, to its current place. There, the ground leveled out, and so the church had been ever since, making it easier for people to visit.

(Collected in 1969 from Molnár Béni. Quoted in the Hungarian Folktale Catalog)

This is also a very common legend type; my grandfather had the same story about a neighboring village. Usually, however, it doesn't succeed. People try to push and shove the church, and then conclude they had moved it enough (while not moving it at all).

Lickóvadamos: A Village of Feral Squirrels (Small Town Legends A to Z)

This year my A to Z theme is Small Town Legends. I am exploring folklore from villages and small towns around Hungary, bringing you the most entertaining bits. You can plan your next visit around them!

Mukucsfalu today is part of the town of Lickóvadamos in Zala County, Western Hungary. The entire place has less than 200 inhabitants, out of which about 10 live in Mukucsfalu. The name comes from 'mókus' (squirrel) and 'falu' (village), so it is literally called Squirrel Village.

And there is a legend to explain the name.

The story takes place during the Ottoman wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. It says that when the inhabitants of the village found out that the Turkish army, under Hasan Bey, was fast approaching, they gathered to come up with a defense plan. They sent the judge as envoy to talk to the bey. The envoy carried an offering for peace: a bag full of two hundred squirrels. The villagers believed that the Turks had neved seen (or tasted) these animals... but they also had ulterior motives. The judge explained that the village is not worth pillaging since all the inhabitants are squirrels. The bey, not entirely sure what to do with the news and the offering, ordered his servants to tie up the squirrels to his tent posts.

The next morning, the villagers found the Turkish camp empty... except for the bey, who was lying dead in his tent. Mauled by sqirrels. Crisis averted.

Sources for the story here and here.

Kisbács: The Card Demon (Small Town Legends A to Z)

This year my A to Z theme is Small Town Legends. I am exploring folklore from villages and small towns around Hungary, bringing you the most entertaining bits. You can plan your next visit around them!

This story comes from Méra, a village belonging to the municipality of Kisbács in Transylvania, with a population about 1,300 (mostly Hungarian-speaking) people. It is fairly unique in folklore as far as I know.

Here it goes:

The storyteller who told this legend claims that it happened to his father one night, when he was heading home from playing cards with a friend. Admittedly, both were heavily drunk on pálinka. The kuli (card demon) followed them in the shape of a large, hairy humanoid creature. It eventually caught up and blocked their way, so one man tore a stake from a fence and fought it. The demon kept getting larger and stronger the more they beat it, and blocked their way again three other times. By the time they finally got home they were exhausted and drenched in sweat.

The storyteller also added that the demon could have been defeated if they had slapped it with their left hand. Hitting it with a right hand only makes it stronger. Allegedly, it is a demon that punishes people for gambling.

(Story from this book)

Ják: The Devil Goes to Rome (Small Town Legends A to Z)

This year my A to Z theme is Small Town Legends. I am exploring folklore from villages and small towns around Hungary, bringing you the most entertaining bits. You can plan your next visit around them!

Ják is a municipality in Vas County, Western Hungary, with about 2,500 inhabitants. It lies fairly close to Szombathely, the Savaria of Roman times, and the Amber Road that facilitated trade between the Baltics and the Mediterranean for millennia. No wonder that there are Roman ruins scattered in the area - including the large broken columns that were known to locals as Devil Stones.

The story has dozens of variants, but here is the gist:

In Ják there was a potter who had a young son. The boy kept accidentally breaking the pottery until his father said "The Devil take you!" in anger. The Devil did show up to take the boy - but the father begged him until he promised to return in 20 years. In that time, the boy grew up and became a priest. When the Devil showed up to take him again, he was about to conduct mass in the church in Ják. Devil and young priest made a bet: if the Devil could bring a stone from Rome before mass was over, he could take the priest's soul.

The Devil then flew to Rome and was returning with the stone soon enough. The priest saw him from the window, turned around, and spoke the closing words really fast. Thus, the mass ended, and the Devil was so angry he threw the stone at the church. By divine intervention, the church was undamaged, and the stone broke in two, just as it is today (the Devil Stones are indeed two parts of the same column). Legend says one can even see the marks of the Devil's claws on them.

There is one variant that also mentions that the Devil's shoes were filled with sand/pebbles along the way. He either emptied the pebbles around Ják, or he flew to Egypt and emptied the sand there, creating the Sahara. There was even one storyteller who claimed an Egyptian person visited the town once, and confirmed the latter story.

Source here. Image from here (the column is now a WWI memorial)

Ják does have a beautiful church from the 13th century. Image from here.

Istvánkirályfalva: Love Across Religions (Small Town Legends A to Z)

This year my A to Z theme is Small Town Legends. I am exploring folklore from villages and small towns around Hungary, bringing you the most entertaining bits. You can plan your next visit around them!

Istvánkirályfalva (Štefanová in Slovakian) is a municipality of about 400 people in western Slovakia, in a region that used to belong to Hungary before WWI. The name literally means "Village of King Stephen", referring to Hungary's first Christian king, St. Stephen (István).

Here is the story:

Legend says that Prince Vajk, the son of Chief Géza, liked to spend time in the village of Vajk (named after him), going on hunting expeditions along the Danube. But even more than hunting pheasants, he liked visiting the place because of the daughter of the keeper of a farm there. She was beautiful, dark-eyed, and they were in love. However, Prince Vajk was eventually baptised, because his father was preparing him to become the first Christian king of the new kingdom of Hungary. The change in religion ended the romance between the prince and the girl. He tried to convince her to convert too, but she chose to keep her pagan ways. Instead of anger, the prince parted from her in friendship, and gave her the village still bearing his own pagan name. Since his new Christian name was István, he moved over to a new place to found a new village, and named that one Istvánfalva.

(I really like this story because it doesn't end in punishment or tragedy, despite all the tensions that surrounded Hungary's conversion to Christianity)

(Source here)